IUSA accused of discrimination, witholding funding

Students for Justice in Palestine are claiming IU Student Association executives have mishandled its application to receive money from the Grass Roots Initiative Fund (GRIF), composed of IUSA credit card revenue interest totalling close to $10,000 annually.\nGRIF funding is specifically intended to help political and religious student groups and their initiatives.\n"The problem is, is that the initiative is already over with, and they (IUSA) don't allow funding for past initiatives," SJP junior Michael Soleta said. "So right now, we are dealing with our group being discriminated against."\nSoleta claims that SJP filed its GRIF application with the past administration of IUSA and were scheduled to represent themselves at a Congress meeting in April, before its event, Palestine Week, on the 22nd. But at the last minute, its representative, SJP's current president, senior Deema Dabis, became ill and could not attend.\n"Following her absence, Deema tried to contact the previous IUSA treasurer (then senior Emily Kolles) to reschedule through e-mail and messages left in the IUSA office, both of which proved unsuccessful," Soleta said. "Palestine Week was still put on, suffering financial difficulties and without being notified of the status of our application by either administration."\nSoleta said there is no way to reprimand IUSA.\n"There's some way that they should be sanctioned. The initiative is over, but our application has not been given due process. They're involved in a conspiracy," he said.\nSoleta said junior Bill Gray, current IUSA president, should be held responsible.\n"He is the president of IUSA. It is his responsibility to address this issue, and he hasn't done that," Soleta said. "(Current IUSA treasurer) Blair Greenberg could have thrown this application out. This is where the discrimination is at. \n"Something is just not right. I'm aware of this. I have (applied for GRIF) before. IUSA executives said there is nothing they can do before SJP files another application, because as far as they know, they have never received anything."\nGreenberg said he never received an application from SJP.\n"I was never directly informed of it," Greenberg said. "To date, they have yet to contact me personally."\nGray agreed, upset SJP is "under the impression the executives have anything to do with assigning who gets what funding."\n"We have made every effort to help them, but they refuse to come in like every other student group and apply for the fund," Gray said. "The executive branch in IUSA has absolutely no control of what groups get funding. I am not responsible for issues that happened before I was elected. They need to be willing to help themselves."\nAssistant Dean of Students and IUSA advisor Jim Gibson said the incident was unfortunate when the application literally "fell through the cracks."\n"To this day I have never seen (SJP's) GRIF application," Gibson said. "My guess is it just either got misfiled or misplaced, and it never got acted on. What can happen now is still being talked through.\n"Hopefully we'll learn from this, and it won't happen again in a transitional period"